Poor Charlie.
He was a good older brother and she loved him very much, but sheesh, he couldn’t help but be a handful sometimes. I mean, he was so smart, how did he not know Tabitha was the most important marketing consultant to the city of Topkea? If there was a convention in town, Tabitha would know about it.
Poor Charlie.
This was bad even for him, making up meeting a girl. She had spent most of her life going out of her way to make Charlie a better person. She thought she was doing a good job at it. Apparently not. Her eyes slid to her daughter, Autumn. “Put your phone away.” She was always on the phone. Good thing she was so pretty.
Poor Charlie.
She decided it was time to step up her game. It was time for her to set him up with somebody. Not her friends, of course, they were a bit out of his league. But she was a titan of marketing. She could sell anything. Surely, she could sell her own brother. Tabitha needed to save her brother from a life alone. Tabitha was one hell of a good sister.
The dishes were done, and Charlie sat on the outdated living room carpet with Alex. They were playing a card game involving magic and hit points and numbers. It was not an even match, Alex was clearly the superior player.
“You see this one here?” Alex pointed the character on the card. He was a knight, his lance roared with flames and his helmet glowed blue (apparently with magic ice powers.) “His name is Halidan. He is savior of the realm, like Taborlin the Great. If he is played when your city has been destroyed, he rebuilds it. He’s my favorite.”
“Seems like a pretty good card,” Charlie smiled, leaning forward to gain a better view of the great but unrecognized by title, Halidan.
“He’s totally hard to find. I had to trade my bike to get him.” Alex stroked the card lovingly with his thumb.
“Your bike?!” Charlie nearly fell backwards. “For a card?”
“Of course,” Alex gazed up at Charlie, his eyes full of worship. “He’s the ultimate hero.”
Charlie’s shock melted. “You’re a good kid, Alex.” Alex flashed a huge smile, then blushed and looked down. He wasn’t one to get compliments often, Charlie imagined. He knew who his mother was. The kid just wanted someone to notice him. To see how important a card was to him. Charlie could relate.
When Charlie went into the television room (as they named it), he discovered Tabitha had achieved the unthinkable; Jeopardy had been turned off. His mom was wringing her hands and chewing on her lower lip. Charlie frowned. Jeopardy wasn’t about Jeopardy; it was about things being as they should be. If Jeopardy was on, life was fine. Ever since Charlie was five and his father disappeared, his mother had brought Alex Trebek into the home, making sure Charlie knew Scipio Africanus the Elder was the hero of the Second Punic War. Instead, the news was on. Charlie glared at Tabitha. In the news, life was never fine. People got into car accidents in the news. Food was poisonous in the news. Dogs bit people in the news. People killed each other for no real reason in the news.
But today in the news, there was a twist. Apparently, there had been sightings around town of some giant beam of light shooting into the sky.
“The city says they believe it was a blown power generator,” Tabitha was apparently going to be the commentator.
“Absurd,” Charlie muttered. “Generators don’t make random giant beams of light shoot up into the sky.
“Shhhh,” Tabitha said. But the news team was buying it hook, line and even sinker. They were interviewing a local man named Damian who swore he saw what he saw, and he wasn’t lying. “I’m telling you what I saw!” Damian exclaimed. “There was a big flash of light. Then I saw a giant metal figure!”
Jillian Davids, the reporter, nodded along with her best “sure you did buddy” nod. Two years of journalism classes for this. “You think this person caused the generator to-”
Damian cut her off. “It wasn’t a person. And it wasn’t a generator. It was a robot, I tell you! And I think a killer one!”
Jillian sighed. Why did she always get the crazy ones? “Okay, we are going to head back to the studio-”
“I’m telling you what I saw!” Damian reiterated. “Then I looked down the street and there was another robot. A red one! Topeka is infested with robots now!”
Jillian stepped in front of Damian and tuned to the camera. “Up next, is your puppy eating enough protein? Stay tuned.”
The newscast cut from the scene and showed some lovely video of puppies rolling around.
Charlie stared at the television a long time. If he was crazy, at least he wasn’t the only one. He did see what he thought he saw.
Good, because he had started to doubt it.
Charlie looked back at the card of the knight. “I like the card.”
“It’s the best,” Alex said proudly.
“Everyone needs a hero in their deck.” Charlie nodded to himself. He was given a mission tonight, to gather his work and to meet the mysterious Jade. She was crazy, but so was the world. The news just proved that. What the hell, he thought. It at least made life interesting. It was worth a shot, in case there was truth in her words, and he could be the hero in the deck. Charlie was going to have a fun day at work tomorrow. There was a mission, and it needed a hero.
Chapter 4
The next day began for Charlie like every other Monday to Friday had (excluding holidays) for the last fifteen years; one seven-minute snooze from 6:08 to 6:15, one fifteen-minute shower, one six-minute tooth brushing session (say what you will about Charlie, but his teeth were spotless), one Star Wars branded shirt worn, a bowl of Pops cereal, and a nine-minute commuter to Bandicoot TechSmart, a mid-sized software company in Northwest Topeka.
It was a mid-sized office building, and Bandicoot took up the top floor. For Topeka, being on a sixth floor wasn’t far from being atop a skyscraper. The office’s views of downtown, through fifteen-foot-high floor to ceiling windows, were quite nice. It was one of the few things Charlie enjoyed about coming to work. Charlie lowered his head as he entered and made his way to the elevator. Another day…
The euphoria, and the alcohol, of the night before had worn off. Charlie felt anxious, which isn’t completely negative since he was familiar with this emotion. After a good night’s sleep, doubt about the truth had seeped back in. As he sat in his cubicle he realized what Jade had wanted wasn’t him, it was the code he had been working on, a side hobby to this day job. Here’s the thing, though. The code was rough, the ideas hadn’t been fleshed out, but even one as humble as Charlie knew there was something unbelievable and groundbreaking in its concept. The future of technology was the intermeddling of human and machines, be it software or hardware. Biological intelligence and digital intelligence would one day be merged. It’s how memory would one day be flawless and accessible, how we would expand the length of lives, and how, most importantly, we would listen to the space-age pop music without a stereo. This was already being worked on in Silicon Valley, but Charlie’s code took it a step beyond. It was a draft of not just how body and machine would interact, but how they would evolve together.
“You dropped down to 88th.”
Charlie turned to see Nate pointing to large digital signage on the walls displaying the ranking boards. It scrolled through the rankings of every programmer at the company, all eighty-nine of them. Charlie was now ranked only ahead of Matthew Weiters, who had only shown up for work one day in the last week, for a total of two hours. This company wasn’t Charlie’s dream job by a country mile, but there weren’t many options in town if you were a programmer. Charlie had one goal while working here; he wanted to work alone. So, he took a job no one else wanted, fixing bugs in their accountant software (yes, it was as exciting as it sounded.) Charlie had written code to automate the entire process, but didn’t bother to tell his superiors. So not working with anyone else on the team and looking like you aren’t working much, is the perfect way to get ranked 88th out of 89th, right above Matthew Weiters.
“Well, it could be worse,” Ch
arlie shrugged.
“You looked stressed, Charlie.” A tinge of concern flitted across Nate’s face. While Nate, at least in his assessment, wasn’t particularly close to Charlie, it was close enough a tinge was the proper amount of concern to have for him.
“How so?” Charlie stalled.
“You broke your pen in half.”
Charlie hadn’t even realized it, half a pen in his right, half a pen in his left, and ink dripped onto his desk.
“Also,” Nate continued. “Your shirt’s on inside out.”
Charlie checked. Yes, indeed. It was true.
“Don’t worry, they aren’t going to fire you. No one else wants your job.”
“Yeah,” Charlie sighed, throwing the two halves of the pen on the table. “It’s not that.”
For Charlie, Nate was his best friend at the company. Which is to say he was his only friend at the company. Which is to say it was his only friend. And so, Charlie told Nate about meeting Jade. Well, he told him a story similar to what happened. He left out all parts about her super-human strength, her thinking she was from the future, her saying he was her people’s messiah, you know, all the parts that made her sound crazy. Which was a lot of parts, roughly about eight parts out of ten.
“So, what’s the problem?” Nate asked, properly inflecting the what’s wrong with you in the words connotation. “She sounds hot. And amazing. You’ve never hooked up in the entire time I’ve met you. What’s the problem?”
“Well…she’s not from around here.”
Nate stared blankly at Charlie. Finally, “What, are you already picturing getting married and a white picket fence?”
“No!” Charlie said a little too defensively.
“Then just meet up with her and have some fun.”
“Yeah.” Charlie gave a cool man shrug. “Well, I mean, of course I’m going to do that,” Charlie laughed sincerely insincere. “Of course, I’ll meet up and have some fun. Ha. I mean, yeah.”
Nate shrugged. Charlie was his weird old self. Abby Chestnut walked through the corridor towards them. Abby was cute in the next-door neighbor kind of way. Not in the Hollywood girl-next-door way, but in a Topeka neighbor cute way. She was also incredibly intelligent and good with computers. There were a few guys at the office with crushes on Abby, she was quite the catch in the ninety-percent male dominated office. Put all those crushes together, roll in a giant ball, then double it three times, and it wouldn’t be half the crush Charlie had on her. What was worse to Nate is he never admitted it. Which made it all the more painful, because Charlie would do all these little things to try and express it without being noticed by anyone and all it achieved was being noticed by everyone except Abby. Nate twisted Charlie’s chair so he could see Abby coming their way. Charlie looked like a deer I the headlights and spun the chair back around.
“Hey,” Nate said loudly to Charlie. “You should bring this girl around. Maybe it will make Abby jealous.”
Charlie slouched lower in his chair avoiding Abby and the light laugh she made as she walked on by. Just another day at the office. Charlie’s supervisor, Taylor Monahan was close on her heels. He had the look of a man who fifteen years ago was a good athlete, and fifteen years later he was still a good athlete who also enjoyed donuts and beer.
Taylor stopped when he reached Charlie and Nate. “Charlie, I need those four deadlines met today. Project approval is dependent on delivery and quality assurance.”
Charlie eyed his supervisor with as much distaste as he could without it being noticed. Taylor had no idea what he was talking about when it came to I.T. It’s like the guy had collected some key phrases and jumbled them together so he could kind of sound like he knew what he was talking about. Charlies best defense was to use keywords back. Words intended for no other purpose than to confuse Taylor.
“I patched a series of nested divs rendering the server-side DOCTYPE to kern the analytics of the CSS framework in a hover state. Everything should be good to go.” He threw in a submissive smile to really sell the package. Taylor eyed Charlie back a long time, his mind racing between knowing he was being toyed with and not knowing if Charlie was actually the genius some said he was. “Okay, then. Well, I’ll pass the info along. But if it’s not what we need…” He pointed a finger sternly at Charlie. “You’ll be the first to know.” His finger trailed to the big board of rankings, more precisely, at Charlie’s ranking. “And, to go.”
Charlie nodded his comprehension.
A ground-shaking rumble rumbled through the office. Fourteen pens, two coffee mugs and lots of paper fell from employees’ desks. It had seemed as if Topeka had a very rare earthquake from the feel of it. Some of the employees, those not worried enough about their ranking to keep working, rushed to the windows. They began to mumble and point.
Charlie ignored it. He was so good at ignoring things, it was better described as an art. Nate was looking at the window but Charlie returned his attention back with a snap of his fingers. “Look, there was a reason I wanted to tell you.”
Nate stood, trying to see past the mob and out the windows. “I think something is happening out there.”
“Why I wanted to tell you about the girl, Nate,” Charlie said, exasperated. “Stay with me.” “Who?” Nate asked, his eyebrows knitted together as his head briefly swiveled to Charlie.
“The girl!” Charlie let out an exasperated breath. “The whole thing we’ve been talking about!”
“Oh, right.”
“There was one strange thing.” There were a lot of things strange, of course, but Charlie wasn’t going to say anything about most of them. However, he did need help understanding one thing. “She knew about my work.”
The whooping blades of helicopters rhythmically beat outside. Sirens blared in the background. Seven dogs began to bark. Nate again tried to see what was outside. Some coworkers were stabbing at Facebook on their phones trying to figure out what was going on. Some videoed the choppers.
“Your job?” Nate asked, half paying attention. “Great. It’s a good job. I wonder what…?”
“No.” Charlie said the next words with hushed importance. “My work.” “Your work?” Nate paused at Charlie’s serious expression. It dawned on him. “Ohhhhh!”
“S!” hissed Charlie. He had told him about the code before. Nate understood about 30% of what Charlie had told him. Charlie was many things, few of them impressive, but there was no denying somewhere in there lay a genius.
Or he was full of shit.
Regardless, it had sounded convincing. Nate’s area of expertise was hacking. He was a hacker and he stopped hackers. If someone random knew about his code, either Charlie had drunk too much one night or – “What did you tell her?”
“I didn’t tell her anything. She told me.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I’ve never told anyone but you. She just…knew about it.”
“Let me guess, she wanted a copy of it.”
“Well, yes.” Charlie wondered where this was going.
“How many encryption levels do you have on those files?”
“Fourteen.”
“Are there other references to the code on anything besides your secure hard drive?”
“Maybe.”
“Sorry Charlie, but what’s the more likely scenario; this girl is really into you, or she knows about the code and wants access to it. She probably works for some billionaire-backed startup in Silicon Valley.”
Charlie thought on it for a moment and with each passing second his paranoia rose. If she knew about the code, and wanted the code, it was more likely she worked for some company with a dropped vowel from its name (Flickr, Tumblr, Scrbd, etc.) There were bits and pieces and references to it all over the place on his computer. Jade was just trying to get the whole thing. Her far-fetched story was overkill, but hey, you do what you gotta do. The beam of energy shooting into the sky and the weird robot looking figure was a nice touch too. Got to give those rich Silicon Valley peop
le credit, they had creativity. There was no doubt though, she was trying to get the code.
The huge bolt of energy that shot through the air. The figures. For the first time, he looked around the office. Something was happening outside. In Topeka, Kansas, where nothing happened. There were helicopters; in Topeka, Kansas. This was not feeling right. Charlie took out the keys to his desk and opened the bottom drawer. There, amongst notes of random musings and numbers, notebooks, old library cards (not related, but they were there.) He threw it all into a backpack. He lifted the false bottom inside the drawer and removed a small box with a finger imprint. Charlie pushed his finger on it and the box popped open to reveal a small piece of quartz about the size of a dime. The inscription, in hologram form between the layers of quartz, was the word Pontus. He stuffed it into his bag.
The power to the building shut down, inspiring exasperated gasps from the people who hadn’t hit control S in time. Charlie was gripped with fear. Through the left-most towering window closest to his cubicle, he saw a red figure; red as the sun. Said sun was reflected harshly off the metallic, long and slender being. He was hovering in the air, his feet aglow in a blue energy. The red as flame figure landed softly on the ledge outside the window and looked at Charlie. This straight-out-of-a-movie, sci-fi, Iron Man doppelganger looked at Charlie. His fingers were sharp as Ginsu knives (add deadly to the list). Charlie was right to be gripped with fear.
The figure swiped the window with its Ginsu knife fingers and the glass shattered into 639,253 pieces.
Chapter 5
Shards of glass slid across the floor with poetic grace. The employees of Bandicoot Computing greeted it with a collective gasp, which was followed by a larger collective gasp when the flying red robot blasted through the broken window. The room fell silent as with each step, the glass crunched with irrational intensity, echoing through the still office. Well, mostly still. Jim Zepeda, of course, was crying, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” But that’s just Jim Zepeda for you. He’d have the same response to a cockroach.
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